LBM Abroad: Music of the Secret Society that Owns Belgrade (KC Grad 2017.01.25)

Last month Live Beijing Music swung through Ljubljana, Slovenia to attend the MENT Festival, one of East Europe’s most vigorously curated musical showcases for new music. Looking to soak up a bit of the East Europe culture, I decided to hop around the Balkans the week prior to the festival. And wouldn’t you know it – on my first night there I stumbled upon a hell of jam in the deliriously seductive city of Belgrade. The venue: KC Grad – the wonderful warehouse space that acts as a beaming hub for the city’s underground music and art scene, located along the Sava, the longest river in the Balkans which houses much of the city’s unhinged nightlife. The event: an one-day festival celebrating the release of the compilation album The Music of the Secret Society that Owns Belgrade from the Turkey based label Inverted Spectrum Records. On the bill: quite a bit. Featuring some of the most protruding bands and artists currently working in the Serbian underground music scene – ‘surf rock based on Balkan pop-folk anthems, urban folk music with Greek, Macedonian and Serbian references, ceremonially improvised psychedelic rock, alternative rock with post-punk overtones, and electronic mutations of Yugoslav-era pop-rock tracks’ – the evening offered an eclectic sonic panorama of the scene and it was a treat indeed. Read the full-break down of the release and give a listen to the mayhem that’s brewing over in Belgrade.